


there were nights I died for you, baby

by badboy_fangirl



Series: This Ain't a Love Song [2]
Category: Friday Night Lights
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-15
Updated: 2015-09-15
Packaged: 2018-04-20 21:46:32
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,615
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4803383
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/badboy_fangirl/pseuds/badboy_fangirl
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This is a bridge of sorts between 2x15 and 3x01 for these two.</p><p> </p><p>  <i>The radio show makes him the mother fucking star of Dillon.</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	there were nights I died for you, baby

**Author's Note:**

> [](http://smg.photobucket.com/user/americanoutlaw/media/Ship%20pics/Tim-and-Lyla_zpssd0sucoh.png.html)   
> 

His words haunt her.

_Whatever it takes._

He said it with a half-smirk and his eyes already wandering over to Miss McGowan. He helps the older woman to her seat in the chapel, joking with Lyla as she moves away, but the serious intent of his words is frightening.

She can withstand the memories, and the relentless way he looks at her. She can even withstand how Chris wants to do the right thing and wait (until they're married), though he doesn't say it. What she can't tolerate is her own lies. _I don't feel the way you feel about me. Move on._ Or how she never really stops thinking about Tim, even when she's surrounded by Chris's family. 

The biggest problem is her, and always has been. She has everything she's ever wanted right in front of her only to discover she doesn't want it all.

It's Good Girl Syndrome. Sometimes she thinks she's afflicted with it; other times she wishes she were actually a good girl. 

Maybe since the first time she kissed Tim Riggins, being a good girl had become impossible.

 

 

The radio show makes him the mother fucking star of Dillon.

In the off-season, he starts to get more calls from arm-chair coaches who think they can do it better than Eric Taylor, and fewer girls asking him out (propositioning him, whatever). The team doesn't make it to the semi-finals, and he should care more than he does.

You know what else happens? Garrity, there every Tuesday and Thursday like clockwork. She rolls her eyes and moves away from him if he stands too close, but the point? She's there when she doesn't need to be, and she can say in half-seriousness that it's to make sure he doesn't assault Chris, which lets be real, he's always on the edge of wanting to sucker punch that guy, but the truth is, he can still see it. 

What he saw in Mexico, what he's seen all along when he looks at Lyla Garrity. 

His future. 

She doesn't see it. But that doesn't seem to deter him at all.

 

 

He wishes he had one more beer in him the night she shows up at his house in tears. He starts it off real good by saying, "I thought you said you weren't coming back here," but then she sort of flings herself into his arms, crying and carrying on. He can't tell what she's saying at first, but it reminds him so much of the night they first had sex in the back seat of her car, on the side of the road, while they both cried about Jason Street, that he decides this must be about Six, too. 

There's a baby coming after all, and it's the kinda small town scandal they haven't seen in a while. Makes sense to him that Lyla would be upset about it, but when he cups her wet, snotty face in his hands just so he can hear the words that spill from her lips, he realizes it's not about Six at all. "Please, please, _please_ ," she begs, "just stop. If you really love me, just stop!" 

"Just stop what?" he asks, because he does have enough beers in him to be slow on the uptake, but not to blackout this entire conversation.

"The radio show, comin' to church, all of it. Just. Stop." She reaches up, her hands wrapping tightly around his wrists. "Please, Tim." 

He doesn't know what to say. He knows what he feels and what his instinct is (never stop, not until he breaks her), but it slowly hits him that maybe that's just what he's done. He broke her, but not in the way he intended, and it doesn't do anything for either of them. 

He presses his mouth to hers, a supplication, a promise. The fact that she lets him is clue number one. "Okay," he says. "Okay."

 

 

She knows it's a sin. 

She got baptized and everything. She changed her ways. She repented, even for Jason. Because she shouldn't have slept with him either, even though they planned to get married. For obvious reasons now, it should never have happened. 

(Tim had been a double whammy, fornication _and_ adultery, somehow.)

The night she convinces Chris to do it anyway, she knows they're both sinners.

(Knows this will ruin everything.)

She sees Tim in the hallway the next day at school, and his eyes don't meet hers. Even in the place they both have to be, the place she can't ask him not to come, he's doing his best to not bother her.

She hides her face in her locker as she starts crying. 

Tim Riggins loves her. He really does.

She cries because she knows Chris does, too, but if she loved him, she would never have done what she did the night before. 

(She doesn't cry when Chris breaks up with her three weeks later.)

 

 

"Hey, Riggins," she says, and he pretends he hadn't been acutely aware of her the minute she walked into Applebee's with three of her girlfriends.

He glances up just as Billy kicks him under the table. "Garrity," he says with a nod.

Something's up, that's pretty fucking obvious from her use of his last name to the _invite me to sit with you_ head tilt, but he just stares at her. She makes small talk for a bit longer, and then gives an awkward, "Okay, see ya later," as she walks away. Her ponytail swishes after her and he thinks maybe he's lost his fucking mind.

On the other hand, the whiplash effect of the on-again, off-again nature of Lyla Garrity is something he probably shouldn't miss.

He misses it. _Her_. There's something about Lyla Garrity treating him like shit that feels like the sweetest thing that's ever happened to him.

It probably has something to do with his abusive childhood. 

He sits there for 45 minutes.

Forty-five fucking minutes.

He deserves a goddamn award.

Billy heads out to the truck as Tim heads for Lyla's table. She looks up, blinking her Disney-princess eyes at him and one of the girls, whose name he doesn't even know, puts her hand over her mouth to hide her grin. 

Maybe she'd had money on this, who the hell knows. Maybe he's that predictable. Maybe he heard through the grapevine (Miss McGowan) that Lyla and Chris broke up.

"Need a ride, Garrity?" he asks.

She smiles, and his whole world flares like a flood light on game night.

 

 

She stands resting against the closed door of his bedroom. There are dirty dishes and filthy clothes across the floor, and his bed, well, it has sheets on it, so that's good, right?

He would look around self-consciously, and even apologize for the mess, but he thinks the roof of his mouth and his tongue have congealed due to the fact that Lyla Garrity not only came home with him, but followed him into his bedroom without protest. She doesn't mention, either, the fact that his dumbfuck of a brother is in the other room, gleefully anticipating what is about to happen.

Tim, for all that he can't speak, is already hard as a rock, because this is a mother fucking wet dream, is it not? The last time Lyla Garrity came to his house for sex, well. Let's just say, afterwards, she made him feel real bad about it. Which pissed him off, and hurt his feelings. 

And he remembers it, but that doesn't make the warning bells going off in his head any louder.

She reaches up and pulls the band from her hair. She shakes out the ponytail that had teased him earlier and in that moment he finally finds words, but not the right ones.

"What about Jesus?"

Her expression darkens, disappointment of some sort evident. In him, in herself, he can't tell. But then one corner of her mouth quirks, and she says sweetly, "Maybe I feel closer to God when I'm with you."

He snorts. "Somehow, I doubt that."

She closes the distance between them. "The point is, Tim, I _feel_ when I'm with you. I want to feel. All of it."

He kisses her then, because who would say no to that?

 

 

There is a secret, silent part of her that hoped it wouldn't be as good as she remembers. That the slide of his hands over her body, and the whisper of his lips at her throat wouldn't be more electric than those goosebump moments at church.

Tim Riggins buries his head between her legs, and Lyla Garrity knows finding God is a different kind of feeling. But just like the first time, when she sobbed her way through the revelation that nothing between her and Jason could ever be the way it had been before, it feels like an answer. Maybe the wrong one, maybe the right one, only time will tell. Tim's hair clenched in her fingers and the shiny red of his lips when he looks up at her are heaven sent, whatever way she looks at it.

She needs it. She needs him. She needs _it_ , from _him_. 

He moves up her body, captures her mouth in a deep, dark kiss, then asks, voice hushed, "Is this real?"

His forehead rests against hers, and she's not sure what he means. Like really happening, or really real? So she says the only thing she can with any certainty. "I don't know."

When he pushes inside her, he lifts his head so he can look in her eyes the whole time. It's new and intense, not the way they've done this before.

By the end, they're both believers.


End file.
